Sarang's latest effort, Don't Look Down, is one of his saddest and best movies to date. (The movie should not be confused with Eliseo Subiela's No mires para abajo, which is called Don't Look Down in its English translation.)
The movie centers on the relationship between Jason O'Neil, a law firm librarian, and his wife Margaret. At work, Jason is stressed out, barely able to keep up with his tedious work. At home, he is disrespected when he isn't ignored. In a revealing scene, Margaret tells him that her friends are coming over for drinks. There is an awkward back-and-forth until Jason realizes that Margaret is asking him to leave the house until her friends have come and gone. Margaret can be cruel, but she can't bring herself to acknowledge her own cruelty.
It's no wonder, then, that Jason finds refuge from both spheres of his life by taking long, unnecessarily meandering walks to and from work. Here, striding along the sidewalk, admiring his surroundings, Jason seems happy and in his element. He can name the types of the trees and the architectural styles of the houses. His sense of the city, its contours and rhythms, its impulses and pent-up energy, is encyclopedic.
When we meet the couple, Margaret is barely bothering to conceal her affair with Jin-woo, a real estate speculator. But things are more complex: through Margaret, Jin-woo has met Jason, who turns out to be hugely useful in Jin-woo's work. Jason can tell him, almost as an afterthought, whether a particular house is undervalued or overvalued. He has an instinctive sense for which neighborhoods are about to pop, and Jin-woo easily translates these insights into huge profits.
But it is more than that, and here Sarang draws down some of the audience's sympathy for Jason. When Jin-woo is selling a house, he arranges for the real estate agent to "bump into" Jason while showing prospective buyers around the neighborhood. Jason then poses as a neighbor and gushes about how much he loves the neighborhood. Jason has a gentle, avuncular appearance—a running joke throughout the movie is that people keep mistaking him for Cass Sunstein, even though Jason is in his early 40s. While Jason doesn't look like Margaret's idea of a good husband, he looks like almost everyone's idea of a good neighbor: earnest, enthusiastic, and ever-so-slightly disheveled.
But of course it's a ruse—Jason doesn't actually live in whatever neighborhood the sale is in—and it's a little hard to see what Jason gets out of it. Jin-woo doesn't give Jason a cut of his enviable profits, though Jason could certainly use the money. Perhaps Jason just wants to feel useful, even in such a tawdry and compromising way. But whatever the explanation, Jason's behavior raises interesting questions about Jin-woo's relationship with Margaret. Jin-woo appears to be losing patience with her. Maybe he is sticking around not because he wants Margaret but because he needs Jason. The three are locked in a triangle that is more transactional than any of them can admit, balanced at the edge of the precipice. And none of them dares to pull any of the loose threads because of what might be revealed, and what might be lost.
The only discordant note came not when I saw the movie, but afterward, when I sent a congratulatory note to Sarang about it. He must have thought I was being sarcastic, because he responded with a quick apology, urging me not to "take it personally." I have no idea what he thinks he's apologizing for. It is one of the best movies I have seen in a long time. I wonder if our correspondence is another one of Sarang's performance art pieces, like the time he published a Chrome extension designed to "improve the accuracy of the internet" by deleting the string "syncra" from all descriptions of me. I still haven't figured out what that was about, either.
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